Gavin Turk subverts still life painting in a London exhibition

In his new series of paintings, British artist Gavin Turk presents arrangements made from household and commercial packaging. Objects appear against monochrome backgrounds, dulling depth of field, and compete for space and attention. The bright oranges, blues and highlighter yellows of plastic contrast with the muted earth and stone tones of cardboard, glasses and egg cartons.

While these paintings confirm the artist's ongoing interest in consumer waste – the subject of his famous Bag (2000), a bronze sculpture that resembles a black garbage bag bulging with garbage, as well as current watercolors of disposable plastic bottles – “The Conspiracy of Blindness” also deals with the work of the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, who is best known for his work is my own paintings of elegantly shaped household objects. (“My art is always other people’s art,” Turk told us in a 2023 interview about his approach to referencing other artists in his work.)

Gavin Turk: “We are what we throw away”

“You can travel this world and not see anything,” Morandi said. “To gain understanding, it is necessary not to see many things, but to look closely at what one sees.” Reflecting the limited color palette and characteristic silence of Morandi's work, Turk's paintings encourage us to examine the objects that are ours Lives are furnished, brought into our homes and then often buried in landfills.

In Turk's hands, these accumulated objects take on a sense of abstraction. Without their identifying marks and labels, removed from their original context, the pure form of each bottle, box or carton is allowed to take center stage, recognizable and at the same time strangely alienated, beautiful and strangely alien. Turk's paintings began as an attempt to catalog his own encounters with disposable packaging – what he described as “an exercise in self-portraiture” – and confront our consumption habits and the global impact of the products that surround us.

The titles of each painting provide both an honest and insightful index of the items on display, recreating brand names and identities, as in the “Thai Dragon Siracha Hot Chilli Sauce” and the “Scala Vegan Basil Pesto” of a canvas or the tub of “Delphi Foods Humous” and boxes of “Maldon Sea Salt Flakes,” which recur in several paintings.

It's as if Turk's series presents the viewer with a two-part challenge: What would these paintings show if they were yours? Would you like to exhibit them in a gallery in London? The work is reminiscent of Michael Landy's installation, Tear down (2000), in which the artist offered his personal belongings (7,226 items) for systematic destruction, dismantling them by a team of workers along a conveyor belt, an inverted production line.

Turk's paintings subvert the conventions of traditional still life painting. While the lavish array of shellfish, fruits, and perishable flowers in 17th-century Dutch still life suggests the inevitable rot and decomposition of their contents, Turk's plastic bottles and containers do not so easily suggest a series of objects about to disappear .